As far as I remember Starchaser, Armadillo Aerospace and Canadian Arrow - perhaps - had to be considered to be the leading group. About others there were no or very few informations only.

May ARCA to be considered the fourth member of this group now and being before Canadian Arrow and Armadillo Aerospace? They have reveiled a new vehicle which is going to be tested soon and they had a successful Demonstrator-flight autumn 2004.

I would say that ARCA are defiently ahead of Armadillo Aerospace, but I would think maybe they are on par or just ahead of Canadian Arrow, its a hards one but at the moment I would probably put ARCA ahead at the moment, as from what you said with a new vehicle and having a successfull Demonstrator test last year.

How can you judge this though? If you are looking at flight experience and knowledge gained through testing then armadillo are right at the top, they have tested as much hardware as anyone else. However perhaps a leading group would be the group that are nearest to spacelfight, in that case ARCA are doing well, still too hard to guess a timeline of when teams will see the black sky though, remember starchaser are coming along nicely!

- many solutions are being tested. There are successes and failures. We can't post a blog all the time, it's not our way.
- inside information? Let me think... NO. We do want other teams to participate and I am personally very sorry that SCSG decided to quit. On the other hand, we worked a lot to find solutions for technical problems. These solutions are relatively easy to copy so... Forget it.
- don't expect us to be like other teams that write tons of messages, blogs, twitter or God knows what else. Expect us to work quietly and to come up with something when we have something to say.

However, if you look at our site, it's obvious that we have 2 directions of development: Stabilo and Haas-ELL. Put yourselves in our shoes. Stabilo is ready for the flight but Haas is not. Isn't it obvious that we should use Stabilo to test ELL in real flight conditions?

The next few months won't be exciting for us. It will be about work, stress, resource issues, plans, tests, possible failures, new plans, etc. We are a small team. We don't have multinational giants behind us. There are some teams that do. But, we will go to space and it will be real. It won't be "five to beam up" and within a few moments you are on board Enterprise...

To use Stabilo for test flights might have positive marketing effects for them - it would show that the suborbital Stabilo can be used to flight test space hardware and attract customers who thenwould increase their funds...